Month: March 2007

Almost everything in life works to their benefit. They influence the laws … and the lawmakers. While the rest of us are working and raising families and coaching Little League teams, they dedicate their lives to gaining direct control over the social institutions. Forget about sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll. The real key to the so called kingdom on Earth … is power.

Today, we’re going to jump right into the fire of one of the most important issues in our society: the pathology of power.

When I moved from Vancouver to Toronto in 1995, Mike Harris’ Conservative Party and their Common Sense Revolution had just been elected as Premier of the province in a huge majority. I was struck by how he used that majority to ram through often controversial legislation that sometimes was directly against what the citizens said they wanted. Not to bore you with details, but the amalgamation of the six cities of Greater Toronto into one huge megacity was pushed through over the overwhelming disagreement of the citizens of the cities involved, who had all conducted extensive referenda within their cities.

Al Gore’s documentary hammers home the same point. The uncertainty is gone, the evidence is crystal clear for most: we have a serious problem looming directly in front of us.

but in all the statistics and graphs and scientific pronouncements, one thing eludes us … what on Earth do we do about it?

An update first. We’ve been sending out copies of Dr. Keppe’s “Liberation of the People” all over the place, to Europe and Asia and of course, North America, and I’ve decided to extend the offer, because I think Keppe’s work in this book is vitally important in helping the greatest number of people possible to become conscious of the reasons why our human society is so messed up, so far from what it could be. A listener from Norway wrote recently that after listening to our New Economy Podcast, he couldn’t help wondering what the world could look like. So write me at rich@richjonesvoice.com if you’re interested in a free copy of Keppe’s “Liberation of the People: The Pathology of Power.”

I’ve been watching An Inconvenient Truth recently, Al Gore’s Academy Award-winning documentary, and I continue to be impressed with the way the scientific evidence has been presented in this most excellent piece of work. It’s extremely well done. And scary.

I wanted to add my voice to the discusssion, because I think one point has not been completely understood. Namely, the cause of human destruction.

Looking up economics in Wikipedia can bring you hours of reading pleasure. Explore micro and macro economics. Delve into the division between the mainstream theories, and Marxist thinking. It’s a vast and, frankly, overwhelming area of study.

And in the end, it appears there are almost as many economic theories as there are economists. Today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head, we’ll explore the new economics arising out of Dr. Norberto Keppe’s beautiful work in Analytical Trilogy, his comprehensive work that unites philosophy, theology and science to give us a new perspective on the human being and his society.

Someone, I’m not sure who, once said that if you lined up all the economists in the world, they’d all point in different directions. Maybe this was more prophetic than he or she intended. Truman pined for a one-armed economist that, as a result, could never say … “on the other hand …”

Economics drives our world in obvious ways through its influence on every aspect of human society. From sweating the family budget to the sophisticated polling and research of lobbyists and think tank academics, there’s no area of daily life that’s not impacted by it.

But arguably, there is no area where we have been influenced more by the thinking of other people’s head than in this one. And some of the theories that have been thrust upon us from these heads have caused us a lot of personal and collective grief.

Some have called it a collaboration between God and the artist. For others, it is a way to escape. It’s been used to persuade, to manipulate and to seduce. Its stars’ sins make headlines, and their victories make billions.

But its impact is much more than simply economic. Today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head, let get some perspective on music.

Music and art have an enormous influence on us, obviously. From babies in mother’s wombs to teenagers listening to favorite artists on tinny headphones in a desperate attempt to understant what’s going on inside and around them, to composers scoring love scenes in award-winning films, music impacts us much more that most of us think about in our day-to-day lives.

Let’s turn a psychological eye to music today, with Italian journalist and musician, Fabrizio Biliotti.